Benjamin Franklin is credited with the invention of daylight saving time. In 1784, he made a joking reference to something like daylight saving in a letter from France -- but apparently never thought anything of the sort would ever be adopted.
When Hudson first came up with his idea for a two-hour daylight saving time, he facedserious opposition from his peers in the Royal Society of New Zealand.
There's now broad agreement among historians that the true mastermind of daylight saving time was George Vernon Hudson (1867-1946), a specialist in insect biology (entomology) who left England for New Zealand in 1881. In 1895, when he first presented the idea to the Royal Society of New Zealand, he was mocked. Other members of the society deemed the proposal confusing and unnecessary. But attitudes changed, and he lived to see his brainchild adopted by many nations -- including, in 1927, his own.
Yet the first 1,400 words of his 1,700-word obituary in the society's annals include no mention of his achievement. Instead, the focus is on Hudson's career in entomology. He was said to have"amassed the finest and most perfect collection of New Zealand insects ever formed by any one person" and was the acclaimed author of "The Butterflies and Moths of New Zealand."
How did a guy who spent most of his free time studying bugs come up with the idea of daylight saving time? It all began because Hudson became frustrated because dusk came so early in summer that it interfered with his evening bug-collecting rounds -- his day job was at the Wellington Post Office. He figured the problem might be solved if the clock were advanced two hours in summer and then shifted back in the winter, when he wasn't bug-hunting anyway.
In a proposal in support of his idea, he explained that "The effect of this alteration would be to advance all the day's operations in summer two hours compared with the present system. In this way the early-morning daylight would be utilised, and a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired."
When he presented his idea to the society, his peers acknowledged that it offered some benefits but insisted that "calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best."
After the WW-I ended, Woodrow Wilson ceded to popular demand and repealed Daylight Saving in the U.S.
World War II brought Daylight Saving back to the fore in 1942, when FDR mandated the measure, now known as "War Time," throughout the United States. This time, it stuck, for most of the country.
For years, different cities and states in the U.S. started and ended their daylight saving time on different dates, creating serious chaos through the country. Congress fixed that by passing the Uniform Time Act in 1966, which set one standard for Daylight Saving. The Act did not, however, mandate the actual use of the Time; those states, like Arizona and Alaska, that did not wish to participate were not forced to do so.
A study by the US Department of Energy, undertaken at the height of the 1970s energy crisis, indicated that the use of Daylight Saving Time reduced American energy consumption by about one percent, a small but statistically significant amount, because more people are sleeping during the darkness and so aren't using lights and appliances. Later studies have not, however, always reaffirmed this finding.
In 2005, Bush signed a law moving the Daylight Earnings Time back to the first weekend of November, a measure designed to help cut down on the number of children injured or killed in automobile accidents while trick-or-treating after dark on Halloween.
Today: Daylight Saving Around The World
117 years after Hudson first proposed Daylight Saving Time, the scheme is in effect in 70 countries across the world. It's observed in all the places highlighted in blue on the map above.
No comments:
Post a Comment